Management Fashion: Lifecycles, Triggers, and Collective Learning Processes

Administrative Science Quarterly, Dec, 1999 by Eric Abrahamson, Gregory Fairchild

This deemphasis on constant transience is problematic because, as Zucker (1988: 26) noted, "Few innovations are widely adopted, by organizations or elsewhere, with most looking more like the social characterization of 'fads' than social change." Put differently, the norm may be variation in discourse promoting management techniques and the widespread selection of certain fashionable variations--job enrichment, quality circles, total quality management, business process reengineering, to name a few--followed in short order by the widespread rejection of fashions that, by definition, are not uninstitutionalized. The exception may be the retention of the rare, once-fashionable management technique, via its relatively permanent institutionalization. Thus, organizational theorists may be at risk of overemphasizing rare instances of stability in institutions, rather than the more pervasive instances of transience in fashions, even though both are important and interrelated parts of a variation-selection-retention p rocess in the evolution of institutions (Nelson, 1995). Moreover, organizational theorists may be at risk of mistaking transient, uninstitutionalized fashions for quasi-permanent institutions. Consequently, they may fail to focus on why a small minority of fashions becomes institutionalized, whereas a majority do not, why knowledge entrepreneurs seek to deinstitutionalize institutions and replace them with a transient series of lucrative fashions, and why, therefore, temporal instability and cross-sectional diversity caused by constant transience characterize the use of management techniques and organizational forms.

Second, not only has there been preciously little research examining why certain fashions become institutionalized and others do not (Rowan, 1982; Cole, 1985, 1989), there have also been no careful tests of recent theories (Abrahamson, 1989, 1991, 1996a, 1996b; Eccles and Nohria, 1992; Brunsson and Olsen, 1993; Gill and Whittle, 1993; Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996; Kieser, 1997) conceptualizing why, when, and how such fashions occur in the first place. Thus, the case study that we present in this article is perhaps the first carefully documented study of why and when a single management fashion occurred and why it took the shape it did.

We draw primarily on Abrahamson's (1991, 1996a, 1996b) theory of the processes by which management-knowledge markets composed of management-knowledge suppliers and consumers, cause recurrent fashions in the popularity of a succession of management techniques. This theory leaves open three conceptual ambiguities that could be clarified with additional case-based theorizing. First, what are the overall trends of the popularity curves of management fashions, and why do they take the shapes they do? Second, to what extent are management fashions' upswings and downswings triggered and shaped by forces exogenous to the management-knowledge market, by forces endogenous to this market, or by both types of forces? Third, does fashionable management discourse evidence a pattern of real learning--carefully considered arguments triggering the onset of the fashion, with counterfactual evidence triggering its decline--or does the discourse evidence superstitious learning, emotional outbursts of unrealistic enthusiasm at th e onset followed by disillusionment in the decline? We attempt to answer these questions by examining the discourse that promoted one management technique, quality circles--small groups of employees that meet regularly, without managerial supervision, to discuss ways of enhancing the efficiency of operations and the quality of outputs--and using that case to elaborate a theory of management fashion.